ChrisB

Off to the Monte Carlo WRC in January (can't wait ).

Will be packing my trusty Digi Ixus and Dynax 5 SLR.

Judging from previous years photo's, it will be dark when some of the stages are run so high speed film will be essential.

Thoughts on 800 ISO vs 1600? I don't have an external hotshoe flash for the camera, just 28 to 80mm and 75 to 300mm lenses.

Probably get it from 7DayShop which is very cheap.

MarkO

Don't go for 1600 - it'll be incredibly grainy....

mattstant

have to agree with Marko how about buying a decent 400 and pushing it to 800 ???

ChrisB

I've never seen a 1600 shot as an actual print, only reproduced in a book.

Is pushing done on developing? So would need a pro lab to do it rather than Boots?

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Chris,

Even with ISO 1600 film, you'll struggle to shoot rally cars after dark with no flash, unless you have a very wide aperture available to you. If your camera has one built in, you might just get by, but only with the shorter of your two lenses - the other will probably shade part of the car from the flash due to its length, and the flash won't be powerful enough to reach anyway.

How big are you planning to print? I'd be surprised if the grain of an ISO 1600 film were too bad on a 6x4 print.

Suggestion: you might need to meter manually before the cars arrive - you don't want the camera exposing for the light pods and seeing nothing of the cars themselves!

A.

*edit* Of course, although the longer lens will cast a bigger shadow, you won't actually see it because it falls outside the lens's field of view. You're most likely to see a shadow from a built-in flash with a wide angle lens, and you probably already know if your camera has this problem.

It's Friday afternoon, I'm allowed to act a bit dim...

[Edited by AndyC_772 - 12/13/2002 5:18:35 PM]

ChrisB

Usually get my prints done to 5 x 7.

Camera does have a built in flash, from the spec' sheet:

Type: Built-in
Guide number: 12 (in meters at ISO 100)
Flash coverage: 28mm angle of view

Would an external flash be a good investment then?

mattstant

pushing means resetting the iso rating on the camera Athough i have never done this myself i know good results can be obtained.

One problem is the lab will need to know so they can adjust which means truprint et al are out of the question and somwehere like colab would be required.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

A good external flash will give you a much better chance of getting enough light onto the cars when they're further away. I'd certainly recommend one, provided it's not too much to carry.

If you're shooting fast moving targets after dark, then pretty much all the light that ever reaches your film will come from the flash (headlights aside). Under those circumstances, if your flash is powerful enough, it will mean that you don't actually need such fast film - ISO 800 should be plenty.

Sadly my experience with film is limited - I normally use a digital SLR - so I can't advise on specific film types. Sorry

A.

Attu

Try Fujicolor Press 800 about the best iso800 film out there at the moment, its gives good colour and the grain isnt to bad unless you enlarge to much.

Andy

paulr

Fuji 1600 is grainy,but not that grainy,i've had good prints off it at 7x5..the fuji 400 and 800 are very good film

stu_allen

Would recommend posting on photo.net - you should get some good answers from the peeps there.
Took a lot of low light (amazon jungle) shots with Kodak ROYAL Gold 800 a few months ago and was very impressed with the fine-ness of the grain.

STi-Frenchie

Attu is bang on the nail - Fuji Press 800 is the best colour print film on the market. Fine grain structure and I regularly print up A4 and bigger with it.

STi-Frenchie

Sample pic taken during a fashion event with Fuji Press 800 and a dollop of fill-flash (external gun)

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Could well be a good choice, yes. It depends on what you're photographing.

A very wide aperture like f/1.7 gives very shallow depth of field, ie. objects slightly in front of or behind the exact distance at which you focus are likely to be blurred. This has nothing to do with the fact that it's dark - it's just that the wider the aperture, the shallow the DoF becomes. You'll see the effect in your viewfinder.

This gives your photos a certain look, which may or may not be what you're after. It certainly makes focus critical, as any error will result in your subject being blurred.

For motorsports (or any moving subject), the advantage of high shutter speed makes it worth persevering. Shallow DoF can help to make your subject stand out from the background - it's not necessarily 'bad', just different, and it's as well to know what to expect.

For other subjects that'll keep still during a long exposure, it's up to you what DoF you want - and your next toy might be a tripod. But that's another can of worms...

A.

ps. got my slides (actually prints from a roll of Velvia) back from Peak this morning - really sharp and the colours are fantastic. Must pay more attention when it comes to blowing out the highlights, though


[Edited by AndyC_772 - 2/1/2003 9:05:01 PM]

ChrisB

Just to BTT this.

Is the Fuji Press 800 something a photo numptie like me can use?

I'll show myself up here and admit I get my developing done by Boots. Had no complaints to date with the outcome but then I'm no pro (who probably shuddered when the read Boots then )

Would the Press 800 film need a more upmarket place like Colab to develop it?

Off to look at prices of add flash guns for my SLR at lunch.

BOB.T

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Chris, I've just bought a Cannon EOS300V, 28-90 75-300.

I've just bought some Fujicour Superia (I think) 800, I'm going to Croft on Saturday, that'll be my first outing with the camera, and only the second time I've used an SLR

Any tips? I think I'll be going fully auto till I suss it out a bit more

Oh, I'm interested in finding somewhere that does good deals on developing, my dad uses doubleprint, personally I think they're a bit boobins

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

I'll have a go at answering this one just in case nobody else does

I'm pretty sure that a high street store will do an equally awful job of printing from any colour negative film, be it Press 800 or Snappia 100 general all-purpose film for tourists (I bought an EOS 33 last month and shot a roll of Superia 100, which Boots managed to make a spectacularly bad job of printing. I'll post an example tonight).

I'm certainly going to be sending my next roll to Colab or Peak Imaging, just to see the difference - it's got to be worth a roll or two to find out. In any case, I believe it's usually the printing process that goes wrong rather than the developing, so at worst you could send your developed negatives to a pro lab and get them printed properly.

Andy.

ChrisB

Be interesting to see the pic Andy. Is it easy to spot a **** up from a high street place? ie it's *that* bad or is it more sutable things only more experienced people will pack up?

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

The pic I'm thinking of is a shot of a full moon taken on a clear night. I set up my D30 (digital SLR) on a tripod, set the exposure manually and got several great shots - black sky and superb detail on the moon itself.

Leaving the lens mounted on the tripod, I then removed the D30 and replaced it with the EOS 33, setting the exposure exactly the same (and bracketing a stop either side just to be sure). The processed negatives are fine - hold them up to the light and it's obvious that they're correctly exposed.

The prints, however, were a different matter. The night sky was GREEN with horizontal stripes through it, and the moon itself became an amorphous bright, white blob. It's obvious that the lab had determined that since my photo was mostly black, it must have been severely underexposed. It therefore attempted to compensate by whacking up the brightness of the image and printing that, destroying the detail in the moon and showing up all the digital noise in the background. (Most labs these days work by scanning the negatives and using a digital printer - optical enlargers don't feature any more).

I took the negatives back to the store and demanded reprints; these were also terrible, and the assistant blamed the machine (a Fuji mini-lab) saying that it was all automatic and that there was nothing he could do. I grabbed my prints and walked out.

Although this is an extreme example, I feel that it illustrates the lack of care that can go into the process. The assistant showed no embarrassment and offered no refund. He didn't even look carefully at my negatives to see that they were, in fact, perfectly OK.

For what it's worth, the other shots on the roll came out better, although they still had an artificial, over-processed look to my eyes - not at all what I expected with film. This sort of automatic 'correction' is all well and good with disposable cameras which have little or no exposure control, but truly horrible otherwise. If I bother to buy a proper SLR and learn how to use it, I should be able to take responsibility for the look of my own photos. If I **** up the exposure, that's my problem.

Today a roll of Fuji Velvia slide film arrived on my desk - very high definition, but totally unforgiving when it comes to getting the exposure right. I'll be sending it to Peak Imaging for processing & printing - admittedly at some expense - just to convince myself that my camera works OK and that I'm not a really terrible photographer.

Andy.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

ps. a WRC car at night with its headlights blazing probably doesn't look that different to the moon... at least to an automatic mini-lab operated by a monkey!

STi-Frenchie

The big problem with a lot of high street d&p shops is that quite often the machine operators are trained to push a button and that's about the limit of their knowledge of the machines they are operating. As has been said, the printing is where it's at (unless you are doing cross processing, pushing or pulling) and these all-singing, all-dancing boxes will auto-correct the hell out of your images. Take an example where you've put a graduated filter on the lens to darken down that sky or a polarizer to get the blue really saturated...these machines will auto-remove the effect.

Colour correction is an art and takes time to learn - I can't speak for the UK but where I am a lot of these "skilled operators" are people passing through and making a few shekels. I recall going to a one hour shop on a Sunday when I needed to get a roll printed quick - handed over a roll of Fuji NPH and the guy said he wasn't sure about how to handle it. I walked out.

Many pro-lab operators are keen shooters themselves and you can talk to them and get the best results possible as they understand what you are on about. Plus, believe it or not, quite often it works out cheaper to take your film to a lab and ask for big contact prints ("bande reportage" or "bande temoin" it's called here) and then you select which shots to get printed up.


[Edited by STi-Frenchie - 1/16/2003 7:41:25 PM]

STi-Frenchie

Andy, Velvia packs a helluva wallop in the saturation department and is my slide film of choice. Also try Kodak's Ektachrome E100 VS for a similar thump with an extra stop. I ran through 10 rolls of it in the summer and the results were most pleasing.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Thanks - maybe I'll try the Kodak film next.

I have a book on my coffee table entitled 'The Earth from the Air 365 Days' by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which includes some truly spectacular photography. According to the note on the back cover, it was all taken on Velvia, and I love the high saturation look.

(Oddly, Mrs C objects if I digitally manipulate photos from the D30 to get the same effect, but I'm free to choose films with whatever characteristics I like... )

A.

south-star

I take loads of photo's,especially at music gigs.
My preffered option is 800 Fuji although i have used 1600.
IMO the 800 is an excellent film,proved by the pic on the previous page.As for your question "Is the Fuji Press 800 something a photo numptie like me can use?"...anyone can use it.Just plonk it into your camera.
I'm also a fan of the 1600,yes there's grain,but most photo's taken in low lighting have grain anyway by there very nature.
Your best bet is to buy a few and experiment.The disadvantage of the grain on 1600 is ,imo,offset by the extra speed and aperture it gives you.

Also IMO,Kodak is $hit film,Fuji has much superior colour balance and saturation.I used Kodak once,....never again.Konica is also worth a try.

STi-Frenchie

I don't often use Kodak print film - Portra for weddings/portraits mainly although I do prefer NPH for a slightly warmer skin tone. I tried that Konica 1600 once but the grain was so clumpy I wasn't impressed with it. That was a few years ago and I believe the newer version is better but I haven't tried it.

For b/w prints I go for HP5 mostly or T-Max (now and again) for a bit more grain and Neopan 1600 when I need a fast b/w film.

On the slide front, it's usually Velvia (or the Ektachrome VS which I was impressed with) in colour and Agfa's Scala for those rare b/w slide moments.

Great thread this - keep the opinions coming !

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

As promised, here's an example of what can go wrong if your film is processed and printed by people without the right skills and attitude:

Example 1: first attempt at printing a pic of the moon, shot on Fuji Superia 100 colour print film. Canon EOS 33, 100-400L lens with 1.4x teleconverter. Note the colour of the background, the horizontal banding, lack of detail, blah, blah, heck I feel sick!



Example 2: same frame reprinted in-store from the negative after complaints about the first attempt:



Example 3: same subject photographed a few minutes earlier using a Canon EOS D30 digital SLR body with identical ISO sensitivity and exposure:



Hm... now, I wonder which one I should use next time...

A.


[Edited by AndyC_772 - 1/17/2003 10:02:44 AM]

Scrappy2

WOW!! That's incredible!!

BOB.T

ChrisB

Wow! I see the, erm, 'issue' now

I was looking at my Jessops catalogue last night and the Minolta flashguns are well pricey. Tempted by a Jessops own brand for a third of the price.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Chris: don't panic, this is a particularly extreme example - although that said, your shots of WRC cars at night might suffer a similar fate, given that they too are likely to be mostly black with some bright highlights.

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to suggest that you do get your films developed at somewhere like Colab - and even consider using the full professional service where each print is individually assessed by hand. Although it's undoubtedly more expensive, the total extra cost I'd imagine is still small compared to the cost of going to the rally anyway. It's your decision, of course, but personally I wouldn't risk it.

I might see about having the moon shots printed at a pro lab just for a laugh - maybe I really did **** up, after all - but the negs look OK to me...

A.